Folklore Lunch Presentation: Archive of Hungarian Folk Beliefs

Our next Folklore Lunch presentation will take place on Thursday, March 14. Our special guest is Emese Ilyefalvi who will talk about the online archive of Hungarian folk beliefs.

March 11, 2019

Please join us at noon on Thursday, March 14, 2019, for our next Folklore Lunch presentation.

Presenter: Emese Ilyefalvi is a PhD Candidate at Eötvös Loránd University, Department of Folkloristics; Budapest and the Hungarian Doctoral Research Fellow at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta.

Within the “East–West” Research Project between 2013 and 2018 two digital folklore databases were created at the Institute of Ethnology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest) http://eastwest.btk.mta.hu/

The Archive of Hungarian Folk Beliefs started in the 1960s, creating file cards from fieldwork materials and publications, mainly from the 19–20th century. Up to 2014 the archive reached nearly 100,000 texts. The verbal charm collection is smaller, contains approximately 6000 Hungarian texts, but from a greater variety of sources and covering a broader time period (from the 15th century to 21st century): codices, marginalia, remedies, witch trials, books against superstitions, treasure-hunting books, 19–21th century fieldworks etc. In this presentation I will briefly introduce the two databases and their utility for further research and discuss the theoretical and methodological dilemmas of making digital folklore collections.